Nonmonotonic Temperature Dependence of the Pressure-Dependent Reaction Rate Constant and Kinetic Isotope Effect of Hydrogen Radical Reaction with Benzene Calculated by Variational Transition-State Theory

The reaction between H and benzene is a prototype for reactions of radicals with aromatic hydrocarbons. Here we report calculations of the reaction rate constants and the branching ratios of the two channels of the reaction (H addition and H abstraction) over a wide temperature and pressure range. Our calculations, obtained with an accurate potential energy surface, are based on variational transition-state theory for the high-pressure limit of the addition reaction and for the abstraction reaction and on system-specific quantum Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel theory calibrated by variational transition-state theory for pressure effects on the addition reaction. The latter is a very convenient way to include variational effects, corner-cutting tunneling, and anharmonicity in falloff calculations. Our results are in very good agreement with the limited experimental data and show the importance of including pressure effects in the temperature interval where the mechanism changes from addition to abstraction. We found a negative temperature effect of the total reaction rate constants at 1 atm pressure in the temperature region where experimental data are missing and accurate theoretical data were previously missing as well. We also calculated the H + C₆H₆/C₆D₆ and D + C₆H₆/C₆D₆ kinetic isotope effects, and we compared our H + C₆H₆ results to previous theoretical data for H + toluene. We report a very novel nonmonotonic dependence of the kinetic isotope effect on temperature. A particularly striking effect is the prediction of a negative temperature dependence of the total rate constant over 300-500 K wide temperature ranges, depending on the pressure but generally in the range from 600 to 1700 K, which includes the temperature range of ignition in gasoline engines, which is important because aromatics are important components of common fuels.